"Statistical tests for structural breaks - an application from the accounting field"

[on-line] meet.google.com/kmq-yady-bxv

Prof. Cristina Florio, University of Verona [CV] [BIO]

date: 10.03.2022, time: 15.15 - 16.15  

The workshop moves from a matter of fact: change is inevitable, in all life and business areas. Therefore, research tools shall be prompted to study in which direction a certain behavior has evolved, which is the intensity of the difference, and whether the difference is statistically significant. Not only: research tools shall be adopted to verify whether the association between phenomena is affected by external, exogeneous shocks.

The workshop helps developing knowledge and competences on the tools available to study the changes and the trends that might have occurred in the society, the business word, financial markets, etc. It especially provides basic knowledge on two statistical tests to investigate change, namely, the Student’s t-test as a type of inferential statistic that allows determining whether a significant difference occurs between sub-samples, and the Chow test as a means to verify whether a structural break occurs between regression coefficients resulting from applying the same regression models to different sub-samples.

An application is proposed where these statistical tests are used in Accounting to investigate whether and how financial disclosure offered on mergers and acquisitions and the drivers of such disclosure have changed in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis.